Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Movies That Suck: Evil Dead (2013)

*Warning - Contains Spoilers*

I recently watched the 2013 reboot of the Sam Raimi horror
classic Evil Dead. The remake was
widely marketed as “the most terrifying film you will ever experience” (which I
knew going in was unlikely to be accurate since I had already seen Twilight on two occasions) so I prepared
myself for a visceral thriller that would shake the very foundations of my
sanity. What I actually experienced was a humorless gore-fest that delivered
clichéd one-liners without a hint of irony all while avoiding any semblance of
logical behavior.

Part of the original’s charm was the tongue-in-cheek manner
in which the events were portrayed. One suspects that was due in equal parts to
the creativity necessitated by a limited budget and the imagination of the
talented crew.

What makes a film frightening is the degree to which the
viewer can live vicariously through the characters. The more likely we are to
find ourselves in the situations faced by the protagonist the more likely we
are to be unnerved and frightened by what they experience.

In the film’s opening scene we are presented with a young
girl whose very soul has been possessed by a demon so vile it has caused her to
murder her own mother. In order to save her soul, her father must burn her
alive in the presence of a rather unattractive group of locals and a few dozen
dead cats.

We are told that this entire unfortunate series of events can be
attributed to a single nefarious book and the contents thereof. Obviously,
having just experienced a horrifying supernatural phenomenon, they take
meticulous steps to insure that the book cannot harm anyone again. I’m just
kidding. They wrap a Hefty sack around it, festoon it with barbed wire and then
leave it on the reading desk surrounded by enough decaying feline carcasses to
draw the attention of every scavenger in the tri-state area.

It is at this same location a group of college students
arrive (somehow managing to navigate a front-wheel drive station wagon through
an active creek barelypassable in a
Jeep Wrangler) to assist a young woman in her attempt to overcome heroin
addiction. In short order they discover the book, recite its incantations, and
immediately begin drawing illogical conclusions from the events that follow.
All of this unfolds in an abandoned remote cabin that, despite having no discernible
power source, is able to provide ample electricity and powered kitchen utensils
when the story requires it.

The heroin addict is the first to be possessed by the demon
which causes her to deliver cringe worthy lines such as “I can smell your
filthy soul!” in a voice that sounds like Henry Rollins produced by T-Pain.
Each character is then subjected to increasingly gruesome injuries at the
behest of the evil spirit, but none fares worse than the bespectacled Greg
Allman doppelganger responsible for unleashing the wicked forces currently
afflicted them. He is impaled through the heart with a shard of jagged glass,
repeatedly stabbed in the face, neck, and cornea by a hypodermic needle, shot
repeatedly with a pneumatic nail gun and then viciously beaten with a steel
crowbar. After that his luck runs out.

In the end, the demon is defeated by judicious use of a
chainsaw and expressionless delivery of the line, “feast on this motherf*****!”
This inadvertently made the most outrageous aspect of the film the fact that it
is possible to start a derelict chainsaw on severely degraded fuel in the
pouring rain. There are people with chainsaws in climate-controlled lockers who
wouldn’t expect that level of dependability from their power tools.

Try as I might, I was unable to recover from the lack of
concern shown to hiding the book in the film’s opening scene. If a single
artifact was capable of inciting this level of misery and destruction I might
put a little more effort into preventing its reemergence. At least put the dust
jacket for David Hasselhoff’s autobiography on the outside cover so that other people
are unlikely to open it. Such common courtesy should be a no-brainer.

There was also the question of which human behaviors were
symptoms of opium withdrawal and which were the result of demonic possession.
Even the registered nurse appeared flummoxed when asked if melting one’s skin
off while threatening the souls your companions was a normal part of cold
turkey. As a layperson with only Anthony Keidis’s Scar Tissue and repeated viewings of VH1’s Celebrity Rehab to guide me, I can assure you these are not common
side effects.

This film is rated R for gratuitous illogical behavior, misrepresentation
of a late 90’s Ford Taurus Wagon and a scene of sexual assault perpetrated by
shrubbery.